A wartime thought on radios.

Actually I would disagree entirely with the idea that "honour" had anything to do with the execution of naval operations in WW2 at all, on either side.

For Hitler's Navy, the trauma of WW1 was omnipresent and inescapable. U-Boats had failed to win the war as promised while adding to Germany's enemies in the process and for that reason alone, a lack of enthusiasm for them in OKM is entirely reasonable.

One of the most perplexing aspects of Nazi naval strategy is why the KM stuck to the fiction of cruiser warfare as long as they did. It had failed miserably in WW1 other than minor propaganda worthy cruises by enterprising and heroic captain's like Luckner and Mueller. WW2 would see a handful of propaganda successes but the surface forces were totally incapable closing the sealanes to Britain for more than a few days and in reality never even achieved that.

As for unrestricted submarine war on civilian shipping, it is a characteristic of machine age high-intensity warfare that made good strategic sense at the time but is largely counter-productive in the types' of wars we have seen since 1945.

There is a scene at the end of the file The Cruel Sea where Ericson, the captain of the frigate HMS Saltash laments the loss of so many brave men and fine ships and comments to the effect of "The U-Boats...for all the good it did them, they might just as well stayed at home." Although a line from a movie based upon a novel, it does pretty much sum up the U-Boat campaigns in both world wars.

In a vain attempt to get back on topic there was several signallers featured in the movie and even a wireless set or two...